Most people who know the island at all know it through its famous literary tradition, its evacuation in 1953, and the tight cluster of roofless cottages near the landing point. But this far corner holds something older and stranger: at least fourteen structures that can be interpreted as hut sites, a mix of sheep-folds and shelters among them, but with enough variety and complexity to suggest a long, layered history of human use well beyond the island's modern settlement.

The islanders themselves called the sites Na Clocháin Gheala, a name recorded by the scholar Robin Flower in 1944. Clochán is the Irish word for a corbelled dry-stone hut, the kind of beehive-shaped structure built without mortar, each ring of stones overlapping inward until the roof closes, a technique found across early medieval Ireland and particularly associated with monastic and hermit settlements along the western seaboard. The northernmost cluster alone covers an area roughly fifty metres square and contains five distinct structures. One is a subrectangular hollow measuring 11.3 by 6 metres, cut back into the hillslope and retained on its downhill side by a low stony bank. Another is a small oval hollow barely 3.25 metres across, its inner wall face still standing to about half a metre. A third is a circular corbelled hut just 3 metres in diameter and a metre high, beside which a rectangular hollow in the ground may indicate the former presence of a souterrain, an underground passage of the kind often associated with early medieval settlements and used variously for storage or refuge. Fragmentary circular foundations nearby suggest the cluster was once denser still.

The site rewards careful looking rather than dramatic first impressions. The remains are low, weathered, and easily walked past, but the variety of forms, oval, circular, corbelled, terraced, hints at different periods or different functions operating in the same space over a considerable span of time.